Buddhism's Flat Earth Cosmology

Mt. Meru and the Four Continents

In the Chinese Buddhist canon, there is an Abhidharma work entitled
*Lokasthānābhidharma-śāstra佛說立世阿毘曇論
(T 1644), the translation of which is attributed to
Paramārtha 眞諦
(499–569). Michael Radich, however, has written that
the “text certainly seems to show knowledge of Abhidharma lore and
terms that should have been unknown before the translation of the
Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, but the terminology of this text
shares very little with Paramārtha's other works. It seems more
likely that the text was translated by someone else.” He further
notes that it appears in text catalogs from the year 594.1

It has some features indicating localization, such as referring to
“western countries” 西國
and “Han lands” 漢地
(i.e., India and China). It is not remarkable
for Classical Chinese translations of Buddhist works to insert such
notes. Nevertheless, the text is definitely a translation of an
Indian work.

This śāstra is
a lengthy discourse on Buddhist cosmology, presenting it as
buddhavācana (the authoritative words of the Buddha ergo true and irrefutable). Chapter
19 is entitled “Movements of the Sun and Moon” 日月行品.
It details a flat earth cosmology of Mt. Meru and the four
continents, explaining in literal physical terms how these two bodies
(which are described as flat drum-shaped deva palaces) orbit above
the disc-shaped world at an altitude half that of Mt. Meru, driven by
a circuit of wind (vāyu-maṇḍalaka).
Solar luminosity is said to be a result of karma of beings. In such a world, the flat earth is
stationary while the sun, moon and stars revolve above, not actually dipping below the edge of the world. The apparent arc that the
sun follows as it rises and sets as seen from earth is the sun following along its
circular path above at an unchanging altitude.

This
was the standard Buddhist cosmology until modern times, and even
today some have reinterpreted it as being what those with “pure
vision” perceive as it would otherwise run contrary to the recorded infallible statements of the Buddha in scripture. Some would also suggest that Buddhists did not
take Mt. Meru cosmology as representative of the physical world, but
this ignores works like this śāstra
which explain observable physical processes like the waxing and
waning of the moon as being a result of the sun coming close to (the
waning) or extending away (the waxing) from the moon along their
perpetual clockwise circuits (the sun is on the outer circuit). In
other words, ancient Buddhists believed the physical world was flat,
stationary and that there were four continents surrounding an
enormous hourglass-shaped Mt. Meru atop which Indra the king of the
gods resides. When he steps out of his palace and looks down he sees the sun, moon and stars revolving around the disc world far below. This is same place that the Asuras once lived until Indra and the devas cast them off the top. They now live at the bottom of Mt. Meru and sometimes climb up "like ants crawling up a tree" to do battle with the devas. This is in line with the mythology of the Indo-Āryans
and what the Buddha himself describes in scripture. A spherical earth, even a geocentric model, is at odds with Buddhist scripture.

Hellenistic
mathematical astronomy was starting to be introduced into India by
around the second century CE.2
Although Indian astronomers especially from the fifth century
possessed advanced astronomical knowledge, it seems that Buddhists
either never became widely aware of it or simply rejected it.
Interestingly, in the year 718 in China a text entitled
*Navagraha九執曆
was translated
by the resident court astronomer Gautama Siddhārtha, who was from an
Indo-Chinese family. The work provides an accurate mathematical
method for calculating one's latitude on a spherical earth (China's
latitude is given at 35 degrees, a rough approximation of Chang'an's
position). Although such astronomy was superior to what was available
in China, the Chinese, like Buddhists in India, either never took
much interest in it or simply did not understand it even in
translation. However, it was probably the case that such knowledge
was kept “in the family” so to speak and as court astronomers
they were not permitted to divulge it. The Chinese state had a duty
to predict eclipses and compile accurate calendars, and such relevant
knowledge was by law supposed to be unavailable to the general
public, though it seems the work might not have been widely studied
even by Chinese court astronomers. In India such advanced knowledge
was likewise probably not widely divulged even in literate society –
it was probably something of a “trade secret” which ensured
families possessing such knowledge could always find lucrative
employment.

This
belief in a flat earth on the part of Buddhists continued into the
eleventh century when the Kālacakra
Tantra
was written, though Edward Henning has suggested the world presented
therein was not meant to be taken literally (see his website here).

Returning
to the *Lokasthānābhidharma-śāstra,
chapter 19 aside from the Mt. Meru cosmology also provides basic
numbers for identifying the time of the summer solstice. This
interestingly also possibly reveals where the text was originally
composed in light of the fact that the length of the summer solstice
differs according to latitude.

In worldly [conventions] there are
30 muhūrta-s
determined to always constitute 1 day and night. 1 muhūrta
has 30 divisions. Each division
is called a lava. When
daytime is increasing, [add] 1 lava
of daytime. If the daytime is decreasing, it is also 1 lava.
Nighttime is also like this. When the daytime is decreasing, the
nighttime increases 1 lava.
When the nighttime is decreasing, add 1 lava of
daytime.3

When daytime is longest, it is 18
muhūrta-s. At this
time nighttime is shortest at 12 muhūrta-s.4

In modern units, 48 minutes (= 1
muhūrta) × 18 = 864 minutes. This point is particularly
interesting because the length of maximum daylight at the summer
solstice differs by latitude. According to the data provided at
www.timeanddate.com in June 2015 the lengths of daytime at the
solstice in the following locations in India were as follows:

Srinagar (Kashmir) : 14 hours, 25
minutes (865 minutes).

New Delhi (UP) : 13 hours, 58 minutes
(838 minutes).

Patna (Bihar) : 13 hours, 44 minutes
(824 minutes).

Chennai (Tamil Nadu) : 12 hours, 53
minutes (773 minutes).

Although the numbers given in the next can only be considered approximate, it is
noteworthy that a northern location like Srinagar in Kashmir
corresponds closer than Patna, which is the old capital of Māgadha.
As Radich points out in the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, the “text
is one of a group of cosmological texts related to the
Lokasthānaprajñaptipāda of the Prajñapti-śāstra.” The
Prajñapti-śāstra is a
major Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma treatise. As is well known, the
Sarvāstivāda school flourished in northern India. These
points, I would tentatively suggest, indicate an original composition
in northern India, perhaps around Kashmir, rather than at a farther
southern latitude such as around Māgadha.

There are other examples in Buddhist literature where the origin of
at least one recension of a given text can be inferred from
astronomical or geographical data provided. One noteworthy example is
the Mātaṅgī-sūtra, otherwise known as the
Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna in the Divyāvadāna collection (for
Vaidya's Sanskrit edition see here, but exercise caution with it),
which is an early Buddhist work significant in its use of mantras,
anti-Vedic polemic and encyclopedic detailing of pre-Hellenized
Indian astrology (i.e., before horoscopy was introduced to India). It
was probably composed in the second or third century. The oldest
manuscript of the text is from
around the fourth century which was written in North Brāhmī script
(see here).

There are two full Chinese translations of the text, one of which is
the Modengjia jing摩登伽經
(T 1300) attributed to Zhu Lüyan 竺律炎and
Zhi Qian 支謙 in
the year 230, but this is problematic. The text provides gnomonic
measurements. A gnomon is an astronomical instrument, usually made of
a thin shaft, used for measuring the length of its shadow at noon.
Shinjō Shinzō in 1928 calculated an average latitude of 43 degrees
from the numbers provided, which suggest a point of reference like
Samarkand in Central Asia.5
Bear in mind that Patna in the early heartland of Buddhism is at
25.6°N. Conversely, according to Zenba Makoto's study, the Tibetan
translation of the same text provides a calculated average latitude
of 27.5 degrees (or if corrected 26.5 degrees), indicating a location
in the vicinity of Māgadha.6

Some of the text's contents also
generally suggest it was originally composed in Māgadha such as the
definition of the māgadha-yojana
(the “Māgadha mile”). The aforementioned Chinese translation
might be a translation of a modified Central Asian recension which
had been revised for the purposes of localization.

Other anomalous features of this
particular translation include the addition of the metonic cycle (7
intercalary months added in a 19 year) and the originally
Greco-Egyptian ordering of the seven planets (Sun, Moon, Mars,
Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn). The latter is especially curious
because such an ordering does not appear in Indian literature until
around the sixth century CE or perhaps a bit earlier. These features
suggest a degree of Hellenistic influence which were added long after the text's original composition.

One
question that comes to mind about the gnomonic measurements is how they would fit in with the flat earth cosmology of the Buddhists?
Gnomonic measurements can be used for calculating latitude, which
probably does not work with a flat earth. However, if the point of
these gnomonic measurements is to determine the exact time of year
from which to calibrate the calendar, then one merely has to know that noon shadows cast on certain days correspond to specific days of the calendar year, which facilitates accurate time keeping. In other words, I do
not believe these indicate knowledge of a spherical earth.

In addition, a lot of the contents
of the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna seem
to have been appended. The lengthy discussions of astrology,
measurements and divination on the part of the main character, the
caṇḍāla Triśaṅku, have no clear relationship to the early part of the sūtra where
Triśaṅku launches into an anti-Vedic polemic against the Brahmin
Puṣkarasārin. Such encyclopedic information presumably indicates
how much knowledge a caṇḍāla
could have, thus proving the fallibility of caste assumptions, though
in my estimation it actually functions as a wealth of knowledge which
Buddhists at the time could draw from for their own worldly purposes. In
other words, the gnomonic measurements, even if they had been
initially devised by an astronomer, were not necessarily understood
in any scientific sense by Buddhists at the time. Again, one has only
to look at the perpetuation of flat earth cosmology in Buddhist
history to see how they were unwilling or unable to revise their
models which were based on scripture.

The
vinaya and other early Buddhist literature condemn both astrology and
astronomy as worldly and inappropriate. The bhikṣu, as an ideal, is
supposed to strive for more transcendental aims such as liberation
from saṃsāra. This
changes later on in Buddhist history with Mahāyāna and especially
Vajrayāna traditions which clearly take a deep interest in astrology
and justify worldly learning as expedient. There are, for
example, five “sciences” (vidyā)
that the bodhisattva should strive to master: grammar and composition
(śabda-vidyā), the
arts and mathematics (śilpakarma-sthāna-vidyā),
medicine (cikitsā-vidyā),
logic-epistemology (hetu-vidyā),
and philosophy (adhyātma-vidyā).

Nālandā

So,
were there any eminent bodhisattva astronomers and scientists in the
real sense of the word in classical India comparable to Āryabhaṭa
(b.476)? Did Nālandā
at its height have anyone pushing a round earth theory? These are questions I plan to ponder in the coming years.
One problem in this area of research is the amount of highly
questionable and wishful Neo-Hindu works on the history of science in
India, which inevitably are mixed in with proper academic works. Fortunately, a lot of work done by Indian scholars in the
nineteenth century, while dated, is still quite readable and worth
consideration.